Background and objectives: In cognitive theories of depression, processing biases are assumed to be partly
responsible for the onset and maintenance of mood disorders. Despite a wealth of studies examining the
relation between depression and individual biases (at the level of attention, interpretation, and memory),
little is known about relationships between different biases. The purpose of the present study was to
assess if attentional bias is causally related to memory bias.
Methods: 71 participants were randomly assigned to a control (n ¼ 37) or attentional training group
(n ¼ 34). The attentional manipulation was followed by an explicit, intentional memory task during
which novel neutral, negative, and positive words were presented.
Results: It was found that individuals with elevated depression score trained to orient away from negative
words did not display a memory bias for negative words (adjectives) whereas similar individuals displayed
this memory bias in the control condition.
Limitation: Generalization of the findings is limited because of the short study time frame and specific
nature of the memory task.
Conclusions: These results indicate that altering attentional bias can influence elaborative processing of
emotional material and that this bias could be one of the causes of mood congruent memory in
depression